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iEARN offers both face-to-face workshops and online professional development courses for educators seeking to integrate online global project work into their classrooms. Since 1988, iEARN has equipped more than 100,000 educators with the technical, collaborative and organizational skills needed to participate fully in a global, collaborative Internet-based learning environment.

PD opportunites with a global education focus

stanford app for ios development lessons

"Brainology® raises students' achievement by helping them develop a growth mindset. When students have a fixed mindset, they believe their intelligence is just fixed-they have a certain amount and that's that. This mindset makes them afraid to look dumb and curtails their learning. But when students have a growth mindset, they understand that their intelligence can be developed. Instead of worrying about how smart they are, they work hard to learn more and get smarter. Brainology makes this happen by teaching students how the brain functions, learns, and remembers, and how it changes in a physical way when we exercise it. "

But this is expensive - about $4,500 for KS3 students to go through the programme.

Howard Rheingold 03 Feb 12 10:09:30 Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck conducted the groundbreaking research showing that praise intended to raise young people's self-esteem can seriously backfire. When we tell children, "You're so smart," we communicate the message that they'd better not take risks or make mistakes, lest they reveal that they're not so smart after all. Dweck calls this cautious attitude the "fixed mindset," and she's found that it's associated with greater anxiety and reduced achievement. Students with a "growth mindset," on the other hand, believe that intelligence can be expanded with hard work and persistence, and they view challenges as invigorating and even fun. They're more resilient in the face of setbacks, and they do better academically. Now Dweck has designed a program, called Brainology, which aims to help students develop a growth mindset. Its website explains: "Brainology makes this happen by teaching students how the brain functions, learns, and remembers, and how it changes in a physical way when we exercise it. Brainology shows students that they are in control of their brain and its development." That's a crucial message to pass on to children, and it's not just empty words of encouragement-it's supported by cutting-edge research on neuroplasticity, which shows that the brain changes and grows when we learn new things. You, and your child, can learn to be smarter.

"# International Review of Curriculum and Assessment Frameworks Internet Archive: INCA provides descriptions of government policy on education in Australia, Canada, England, France, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Korea, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Northern Ireland, Scotland, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the USA and Wales. It focuses on curriculum, assessment and initial teacher training frameworks for pre-school, primary, lower secondary and upper secondary education in schools (3-19 age range)."

If you still believe that professional development is what happens on those two or three days each year when you sit in a classroom and have some expert "deliver" it to you, I have bad news. That model is no longer sustainable and the days of PD as something that is done "to you" by "experts" a couple of times a year are over.

Professional development site

"How close are we to this? The post was written in December 2009, and Blake-Plock says he's seeing some of these already beginning to come to fruition."

"Google has a number of great applications that can assist you with the technology staff development efforts in your school and the best part about it, is that they are all free and easy to use. "

The idea is that yuo begin with curation which will eventually lead to creation.

"Bamboo DiRT is a tool, service, and collection registry of digital research tools for scholarly use. Developed by Project Bamboo, Bamboo DiRT makes it easy for digital humanists and others conducting digital research to find and compare resources ranging from content management systems to music OCR, statistical analysis packages to mindmapping software."

Collaboration Our primary goal at this point is to prove or disprove the effectiveness of puzzles as a learning strategy. If you are a teacher who would like to experiment with these ideas in your classroom please contact us. We'd love to work with you. In fact, regardless of who you are, if these ideas seem promising and you'd like to help or try them out, please contact us. We're very open with our work and are interested in collaborating with anyone we can, within the constraints of our very limited resources. You can reach us at info@puzzleschool.com Our Mission The Puzzle School was started with the mission of creating educational environments that will inspire a greater love of learning. We strongly believe that learning is something people truly love to do when it is presented in a way that gives the learner a sense of progress toward their learning goals. We focus on puzzles as they provide one of the most effective ways of creating a learning environment that is interactive, giving students an immediate sense of progress as they try to "figure out" the material they are learning. The methods we use at The Puzzle School mimic the learning environments that children thrive in while learning how to walk and talk. This model can best be summed up as hypothesis and error driven learning, where students develop a hypothesis toward solving a problem and are able to test that hypothesis using feedback loops, learning from a success or failure as they move closer to a solution. This model has been used successfully in thousands of schools around the world, most notably Montessori Schools. We simply want to highlight this method and make it so that all students have access to environments where they can learn in this way. We believe this will encourage a love of learning in all students.

We are looking into buying iclone and crazy talk for IcT/LRC, Can you imagine the amazing work we could do with both?

Catroid is a visual programming language for Android devices that is inspired by the Scratch programming language for PCs, developed by the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at the MIT Media Lab. It is the aim of the Catroid project to facilitate the learning of programming skills among children and users of all ages. No desktop or notebook computer is needed.

"Apple's giving developers a preview of the next version of Mac OS X today called Mountain Lion. The software, due out this summer, once again brings over features from Apple's iOS."

"To use App Inventor, you do not need to be a professional developer. This is because instead of writing code, you visually design the way the app looks and use blocks to specify the app's behavior."

Brilliant!!! Scratch style app building. MIT has done it again...

It is no secret that mass media is an important part of today's cultural landscape. But while people are consuming media, they are also creating it. More and more, people are creating their own messages, sharing the work of others, and excerpting from other people's work as part of their own creativity, learning and development. Therefore, there is a need for a strong understanding of the concepts of copyright and fair use and how to apply it in an educational setting. While copyright and fair use can be confusing to navigate you CAN use copyrighted material in your creative work! The panel goal is to explain fair use as a reasoning process in order to reduce copyright confusion. We will model the process by sharing scenarios for the audience to deconstruct and will go through our own reasoning and analysis of "sticky copyright situations" and share helpful ideas regarding how to teach students and staff about copyright and fair use.

Sesame Street began in 1969 as a simple yet revolutionary idea to use television to help kids learn. More than four decades later, Sesame Street is the longest street in the world, stretching across 150+ countries and all kinds of media, from books to radio to mobile devices. Led by its famously furry cast, the show addresses a wide spectrum of children's learning - ABCs and 123s, health, mutual understanding, and more - with an approach that's brilliantly adaptable to local cultures and educational needs. Sesame Street is a production of Sesame Workshop, a nonprofit educational organization making a meaningful difference in the lives of children worldwide by developing innovative and engaging educational content delivered in a variety of ways -- including television, radio, books, magazines, interactive media, and community outreach. http://www.sesamestreet.org